Great Salt Lake is an ironical joke of nature - water that is itself more desert than a desert.

Moody and withdrawn, the lake unites a haunting loveliness to a raw desolateness.

Salt Lake has a shot at the playoffs, and we are the team standing in their way,

After how well things went in Salt Lake, everybody really wanted to get [to the Olympics] badly. So it pressed everybody to really lift their level.

It's important that everyone feels they have a role on this team. They told me in 2002 (in Salt Lake City) I would play at least one game and I was really excited. Just to have that chance ... and hopefully these guys will feel the same way, that they'll play one game or two.

I’d forgotten how enlivening it could feel, seeing clearly and far. Aridity frees light. It also unleashes grandeur. The earth here wasn’t cloaked in forest, nor draped in green. Green was pastoral, peaceful, mild. Desert beauty was “sublime” in the way that the romantic poets had used the word- not peaceful dales but rugged mountain faces, not reassuring but daunting nature, the earth’s skin and haunches, its spines and angles arching prehistorically in sunlight.